Storage Special Reports:

Special Reports

Since the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended, e-discovery rulings have been all over the map. This Special Report offers information about recent legal cases in which e-discovery played a major role, product information and advice on compliance to help you understand e-discovery today and looking forward.

Although less than a decade old, iSCSI is on its way to becoming the de facto technology for storage area networks, nudging Fibre Channel into a corner for high-performance applications only. This Special Report offers analysis on the state of iSCSI today and an overview of iSCSI products on the market today. This report also offers a podcast with Andrew Reichman, an analyst with Forrester Research who tracks data storage systems and storage management.

For all the talk about green storage, the power-saving initiative remains more of a server issue than a disk storage issue. But that may change quickly, due to the rapidly increasing rate of data growth and the continuing energy pinch. Experts agree that it's only a matter of time before storage becomes the No. 1 consumer of power in the data center. Still, green storage is more of a dollar issue than an environmental one. And while power and cooling issues are gaining in importance in the storage world, the strategies pursued by storage managers to become more environmentally friendly will likely continue to be driven by dollar signs.

The emergence of file virtualization products is the result of poor NAS management. NAS boxes lacked central management, and it was difficult to access files on all of the storage connected to NAS. File virtualization appliances create a layer between the file servers and the client boxes that access them. The layer manages files and file systems across servers, presenting client boxes with one logical file mount for every server, while the servers host the file data and metadata.

Growing friction between VMware Inc., the company that dominates the server virtualization market, and storage vendors is having repercussions across the storage industry. And as some storage vendors start to fight back against what they see as VMware trespassing on their turf, storage managers are caught in the crossfire, unsure how to proceed in adapting storage infrastructures to work with virtualized server environments.

Few technologies are more confusing than storage virtualization. Without a guide to explain the different storage virtualization solutions, storage administrators who want to deploy this technology will be lost.

Most storage managers will agree that data classification is a good thing. But there's far less agreement among storage managers on where data classification fits into a storage environment, and almost no agreement on the best way to classify data.

Traditionally, NAS systems have had limitations in throughput, connectivity, reliability and scalability. As a result, mission-critical storage tasks still required a SAN. Today, a new generation of high-performance NAS systems promises to overcome past limitations, bringing SAN-type features and capabilities to file-based storage.

Although Windows Server 2008 isn't feature-rich for storage, the latest version of the Windows operating system includes Hyper-V and other enhancements that will help benefit storage performance in the long run.

A small group of vendors are starting to help storage administrators take duplicate data out of their primary storage environments. There's a lot less redundant data in primary than in secondary storage.